


The Dig

by Bluewolf458



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 12:43:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1983453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a young archaeologist, Daniel is participating in a dig.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dig

The Dig

by Bluewolf

The soil around the ancient ruin was dry, cracked into geometric shapes, and what vegetation had once grown around the nearby dried-up oasis was long withered and crumbled into dust, to be blown away by the unrefreshing gusts of hot, hot air that purported to be a wind.

Daniel Jackson had spent his very early years in Egypt with his archaeologist parents; anyone might have been forgiven for thinking that this sort of heat was reasonably familiar to him. What everyone forgot, Daniel thought resignedly, was that after their deaths, he had gone back to America and spent the rest of his school and college years in a colder, wetter environment.

A furnace would have been cooler, he thought as he crouched in the minimal shade of one of the walls, troweling carefully deeper to reveal more of the wall.

This had seemed such a great opportunity; a dig to investigate ruins nobody had ever seen before, ruins uncovered by a sandstorm - well, duststorm was probably a more accurate term - a few months previously - and certainly they had found some fascinating artifacts. But Professor Levins, site director, was not a good leader. Granted, he took no privileges that he denied his team, but it would have made a vast amount of sense to have started earlier in the morning, when it was still relatively cool, and given the men a break in the blistering heat of the early afternoon. Levins, however, was clearly not a morning person and equally clearly couldn't understand why anyone would want to be out of bed and working at 6 am, when he could have three more hours in his sleeping bag and start at 9... by which time the air, and the soil, had heated up and working conditions had become unpleasant. But Levins seemed to consider that preferable to getting up with the dawn.

Daniel's busy trowel revealed something ivory-white, and after a further minute of careful scraping he confirmed that it was a bone. A long bone. He worked along it, came to a joint that he decided was a knee and continued up the length of the leg. Soon he reached the pelvis, and having cleared it, paused for an unrefreshing drink of water, sun-warmed although he had left the container in the shade of the wall.

He scraped away some more earth, revealing more of the pelvis, then peered myopically closer as his trowel uncovered a small, impossibly curled spine projecting just above the pelvis. Further investigation of the spine led to a strangely-shaped head carrying what looked like unpleasant teeth.

The spine looked as if it might belong to a snake, but no snake he had ever seen had a head like _that_!

Daniel considered it for a moment.

Was this, perhaps, a possibly always rare, now extinct, species? Had it perhaps bitten and poisoned the man - from the appearance of the pelvis he was sure it had been a man - buried here, whose friends had seen and killed it and buried it with its victim to appease the dead man's spirit? Or had it been a scavenger, burrowed down to feast off the newly-dead body, possibly killed by the earth collapsing on top of it? Come to that, was the theory of alien settlement that he was beginning to formulate true, and this _thing_ some alien creature, perhaps a pet, killed and buried with its master?

Although the skeleton looked human enough.  

He made a quick, careful sketch, then carried on clearing the skeleton, carefully scraping away the earth that surrounded the long-dead bones. Finally, with the entire skeleton showing, Daniel made a second sketch, then called Levins over.

Testing subsequently revealed that the man and the snake had died at the same time, some five thousand years previously.

Daniel finished his time at the dig without finding anything more important than the body - which Levins, with no real proof, instantly decided had probably belonged to a fairly important man of the long-vanished community - and returned to America.

It was the last time Daniel was to participate in a dig, in Egypt or anywhere. Not long after, he announced his alien theory publicly, and was totally discredited. He should have known Von Daniken's 'spacemen visited Earth, and here's the proof' books wouldn't help his more scientific presentation.

***

Over two years later, as a member of the Stargate program, he realized that what he had found was probably the body of a Jaffa and his symbiote, both killed in the uprising that drove the Goa'uld from Earth.

He decided not to check on what Levins' final assessment of it had been.


End file.
